


Recovery in Red

by Flufferdoodle



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Addiction, Adrenaline, Angst, CW: Blood and references to self harm, Friends matter, Friendship, Hurt, M/M, Makoto is a good character, Moving On, Post-Canon, Recovery, Reflection, Yusuke is beautiful, all i'm thinking about while writing this is cowboy bebop
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:48:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29423334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flufferdoodle/pseuds/Flufferdoodle
Summary: Ren would say he misses the Metaverse so much it hurts, but the problem is that he's not in pain.
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist, Kitagawa Yusuke & Persona 5 Protagonist, Morgana & Persona 5 Protagonist, Niijima Makoto & Persona 5 Protagonist, Persona 5 Protagonist & Phantom Thieves of Hearts, implied
Comments: 10
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

Ren locks the door and turns around. The light almost flickers, the smell of coffee’s a little off. He turns back to the door. Unlocks it. Locks it again. Unlocks it. Locks it.

Nothing sits right anymore.

Outside the Leblanc, the street’s quiet. He knows if he wanders out a ways, he’d find a drunk man shouting to the night. Ren considers joining him sometimes.

Makoto told him quietly, sincerely, that everything would get better with time. That the void – the big, gaping void that nothing seemed to fill – would shrink. Grief’s like a box, she said. A box with a ball and a button. Every time the ball presses the button, he feels pain and numbness. The ball starts out massive, and every time he moves it hits the button. But over time it shrinks, like the void, and hits the button less and less.

The pain never fully goes away. The button never disappears. But it gets hit less frequently, especially if the box stops getting rattled.

Ren walks upstairs and shoves everything off his desk to make room for lockpicks. Morgana looks up from where he’d been napping, ears twitching.

Sometimes Ren wonders if Morgana was serious about wanting to find a way to be human. It was unfair. Unfair and tragic that Morgana was still in a cat’s body. He was never a cat – they knew this now – and never a human. He was just… Morgana. One of a kind.

They were all one of a kind, but at least they didn’t lose their bodies the way Morgana had.

Ren lost a lot of things, but he still stood on two legs.

“Whatcha makin’?” Morgana asks. He leaps from the edge of the bed – a real bed, now – and sprawls on the desk. Just like he always did.

“Lockpick,” Ren says.

Morgana nods. “What for?”

Ren shrugs, and Morgana doesn’t press. His eyes shine in the moonlight, distinctly feline. Ren wonders if his vision was different in the Metaverse if his eyes changed so much.

It’s been so long.

He wants to ask, still. But it’s been so long.

Ren went home for the summer. It was freeing, at first. He’d needed a break. They all needed a break. The wind whipping through his hair, the Phantom Thieves packed in the van, the sun shining overhead – he felt so liberated. The Metaverse was so full and intense and demanding. It wasn’t sustainable to live based around that.

“It looks perfect,” Morgana says, voice thrumming with approval. “You’re as proficient as ever.”

Ren nods, but nothing changes.

He walks back downstairs, Morgana following him.

He stares at the door. Morgana presses against his ankles.

Ren grabs a cup of water and returns upstairs.

“It’s been a long day,” Morgana notes as Ren sits back down, “but… did you want to do anything tonight? It’s only a few more days before you return back to university. It’d be nice to spend some time with our friends again.”

He doesn’t need to go to bed on time, now, because there’s no Metaverse he has to be ready for. His body has nothing to recover from.

Ren misses the aches of bruises, the pretty red lines of scabs. His scars have faded to pale white lines, many gone entirely.

He wants to see blood again.

Sometimes he gets to, in the form of papercuts or hangnails. Sometimes he’ll get lazy while shaving and there’ll be a little nick, a little streak of red running down his cheek next to his black hair. Always red. Always black.

The colors make him feel so nostalgic and lost that everything in his dorm room is blue. Blue like velvet.

He wonders what Igor and Lavenza do now. He has so much he wants to ask, about Personas and Wildcards. About the Metaverse.

No matter how grand the plots they faced were, Ren can’t believe that this whole ordeal _doesn’t_ run deeper. His key sits in his suitcase. Other guests of the Velvet Room had received their keys the first time the visited, she’d said. Who were the others?

Ren tries not to entertain these thoughts. He tries to not linger in Shibuya or Shinjuku, looking for a girl who isn’t there. Seeking a door that no longer exists.

They have no more use of him.

Ren pulls out his phone, nodding at Morgana. He texts Yusuke.

Half an hour later, they’re people watching in Shibuya. Yusuke’s pencil scratches hard against the sketchpad while Morgana paws at a moth flitting through the air, and Ren tries to escape his own thoughts by considering those of others.

Spending time with Yusuke is often the easiest when Ren’s feeling like this. Yusuke never pushes for conversation or shared activity. He’s content to just be here, give his company, and stay focused on his own work. His eyes are deep and beautiful, just like his quiet voice.

Ren knows Yusuke misses the Metaverse, but likely for different reasons than the rest of them. To Yusuke, the Metaverse provided endless opportunities to study and understand themes who ached to put into art. He enjoyed battle only as much as it gave him glimpses into the beauty of struggle and the horror of violence. Yusuke disconnected himself from his body, it seemed, and the experiences they all felt – adrenaline pumping hard through their veins, fear mixing with glee as they danced across chandeliers and scraped their arms through vents, power radiating through the very cores of their beings – were something to be dissected and expressed with paintbrush on canvas rather than accepted and pursued.

He shared one thing with Ren, though.

The love of the style.

They both viewed the heists as performances, themselves the dashing actors giving everything to fill the role. Everything about the way they fought was beautiful and elegant, even when they were beaten and bruised, blood drying on their skin. _Especially_ then.

After all, what’s more poetic than calling out the depths of your soul while drenched in your own life force?

“Ren,” Yusuke says. His voice is so deep.

Ren wonders, not for the first time, if his life would be better if he could just forget Akechi and pursue Yusuke. Ren goes through these thoughts with almost all his teammates, all his confidants, wonders if he could just let go. Ren knows he can’t.

“Yusuke,” Ren answers.

They make eye contact. Ren wonders what Yusuke thinks when he sees his own face. Has he ever done a self-portrait? Does he appreciate the graceful curve of his nose, the heavy slant of his eyes?

“You seem to be rather deep in thought as of late,” he says. “Is there anything you would like to talk about?”

_How did you move on?_

Ren shrugs.

Yusuke waits. He waits the way Ren waits for him, giving him time to organize his thoughts and display them properly.

“I miss the Metaverse,” Ren says, “and I miss Akechi.”

Because that’s all there is to say, really. It’s enough to be honest, but not enough to concern anyone.

He rests his chin on his hand, and a comment Ann made a while back about the oils on one’s hand causing acne plays in his mind. _I haven’t had acne in years,_ he mentally informs her.

Yusuke nods. “Those two were integral to your identity, were they not? The leader of the Phantom Thieves, pioneers of the Metaverse, and your destined rival. You must be lost finding a new mask to wear now that both have been ripped away.”

“Pretty much,” Ren agrees.

“It’s an interesting concept. Identity. I’ve touched on it in works before, but…” He looks away, humming as the crowd shifts in the late evening. The families have disappeared, replaced by young couples and rowdy high school students. “It was difficult when I lost my role as Madarame’s pupil. It felt like everything I knew had been ripped from my chest and put on display for the whole world to see. His fall from grace was so public, and I had been so involved… But I had a new identity waiting for me, with the Phantom Thieves. And I still didn’t lose the most important part of me. I was still, to my very core, an artist.” Yusuke flips the page of his sketchbook and gets back to work. “What were you, before you were a Phantom Thief?”

Morgana’s eyes shine bright as he looks up at Ren, curious for the answer.

Tokyo is so full of people. They crowd every street, every corner, occupy every room of every building. Chatter and mutterings mixed with announcements play with bright screens and colorful shops as if they’re all fighting to overload Ren’s senses.

The Metaverse was louder, though. Its colors more saturated.

The sensations he experiences sitting at a table on the busiest street in Tokyo are a pale shadow of what coursed through him in the depths of Mementos.

“I don’t think I was anything.”

“What did you want to be?” Morgana asks.

Ren did a lot of things before he came to Tokyo. Constantly picking hobbies up and putting them back down. His parents grew frustrated with his inability to commit to anything, tired of his ever-growing collection of uniforms in his tiny wardrobe. Band, figure skating, judo. Science bowl, literature club, ikebana. Jack of all trades, master of none. No wonder he was a wild card.

“I didn’t know.”

“Oh,” Morgana says.

Yusuke hums in agreement. His pencil stills against the sketchbook for just a moment before moving again, movements short and jerky. “A tragic story,” he says quietly. “A lost soul with no name to hold themself together, crushed heavily by a sudden fate. Handed the identity and sense of belonging they could never quite find, they eventually discover it was all manufactured. And it crumbles.”

“Yusuke!” Morgana shrieks. “Why would you _say_ that? His identity wasn’t manufactured any more than the Phantom Thieves were! He overcame the false reality! Jo- Ren is still young, anyways. It’s normal to not know what you want to do! Nothing’s crumbled!”

But it had.

“We should head home before the trains stop,” Ren says, and Yusuke nods.

“Ren, if you would ever like to talk, I would be happy to. You are my dearest friend, and if I can help you in finding your identity, simply say the word. It’s the least I can do.”

Yusuke looks so handsome in his earnest companionship, and Ren wishes, again, that he could forget Akechi.

They stand, a bottle dropping out of Yusuke’s bag in their slight shuffle. It’s red. Crimson. Full of paint.

Some part of Ren screams at him to slip it in his pocket, but he can’t do that to Yusuke. He grits his teeth for a moment before picking it up and nudging his friend.

“Ah,” Yusuke says. “Thank you.”

Ren’s eyes stay focused on the red paint, and he feels something in his brain click.

They bid each other farewell, and before he knows it, Ren is back in Yongen-Jaya. His mind is flashing pictures so brightly that he can barely focus as he stumbles into the Leblanc, barely understands as Sojiro says goodnight. He tells Morgana he needs to step out for a minute, and Morgana swishes his tail worriedly before agreeing. Giving him this little bit of space.

Back then, they were inseparable. Morgana would only leave when Ren was safely deposited with someone else. Ren was never alone, except for that little bit after Hawaii. That was temporary. It sill stung.

But Ren needs space right now, right as he walks down to the small craft store by the theater.

It’s closed, of course, but he can’t wait.

He pulls a lockpick out of his bag. He has so many still, more than just the one he made earlier and left on his desk. He thought they’d go back to Mementos, after all, and never knew when to expect the Palace to end.

Ren picks the lock on the door and the store’s so old there’s no other alarms to go off. He walks to the aisle of paints, neatly assorted in the order of the rainbow, each brand on a different shelf.

He swipes the biggest bottle of red he sees and steals back out into the night, gently closing the door behind him. Morgana studies him carefully.

“I’m going to be up for a while,” Ren says. “You might like Futaba’s better.”

“Will you be okay? You seem really off tonight.”

“I’ll be fine. I’ll call you if I need you.”

Morgana’s tail flicks, and Ren morbidly wonders if he has the lifespan of a cat.

This rattles him.

Morgana nods. “I’ll be back early, okay? Don’t do anything dumb.”

And Morgana’s out the door just as Ren starts to wonder if he should just be maximizing his time with Morgana instead, because Morgana might have the lifespan of a cat and Morgana might be as fragile as a cat and the streets aren’t safe even for people and-

And Ren has red paint right now. Red like the Metaverse. Red like blood.

Ren steps into the bathroom and slides down to the tile floor, hands trembling around the bottle.

He pops off the lid and removes the little plastic stopper.

It doesn’t smell like blood. It smells like Yusuke, but cheap, because the broke student is only poor due to the amount of money he puts towards quality materials.

Ren doesn’t need fancy.

Ren needs red.

It doesn’t smell like blood, but it doesn’t smell completely unfamiliar. Yusuke was in the Metaverse too, close enough to smell during a baton pass, during a harisen recovery. In the Mona-van, they’d squish together in the backseat alongside the stash of treasure, but Yusuke smelled a little less like paint and a little more like blood and violence. The faint scent of warmth and craft pushed so closely against Ren’s nose struggled to compete with the smell of subways and rotting that permeated Mementos.

But this is what Ren has.

He strips off his shirt and dumps the red onto his hands. It’s thick. Thicker than blood. Cold, too. Blood dried before it chilled, unless there was a lot.

Ren smears the paint between his hands, rubbing hard to heat it up, and it starts to congeal. That’s wrong. It’s wrong. But it looks more right, having the paint on his hands, having his hands red, red, red, and he smears it on his chest and on his face. He gets it on his pants before he kicks those off, too, and rubs it onto his legs.

The blood would brown as it dried and glean differently in different lights, so Ren turns the lights off, mesmerized by the red paint he leaves behind on the light switch. He turns on the water and runs it under his hands, watching the red tinted fluid swirl down the drain.

Blood, blood, blood.

There was no pain here. He wasn’t bleeding.

But it was better.

Better with the paint. Better with the red.

He stays like this, water running, over his coated hands, until the adrenaline fades. He awkwardly dries himself with paper towels and throws on the oldest clothes he can find and camps outside the bathhouse until it opens at first light. Morgana will have to wait to see him later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i might write more for this idk in the form of more chapters or a series. not sure what'll fit yet. not sure if i'll have time.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah okay i decided to keep working on this and make it a multi-chaptered fic

It started long before the Metaverse.

It started with high school. With overwhelming assignments and activities, with new places to go and tasks to complete every single night. It started with his brief foray in figure skating, with the fear settled deep into the pit of his stomach before he stepped out into the ring. It started with the high coursing through his veins as the world watched him skate and dance, with his heart pounding so hard that he could hear nothing else.

Ren completed his first performance and the adrenaline dumped out of his system, leaving a shaky, tired boy in its wake.

He fought tooth and nail to perform the next weekend, and the weekend after that.

Then came band, where he picked up the saxophone and auditioned for every solo just to get his nerves going again. The energy and the anxiety mingled together to bring the world to a whole new light, a light he couldn’t live without.

On the rare weekends he has a chance to breathe, he doesn’t. He waits, anxiously, until the last possible minute and rushes through everything due the next day. A small high. A taste of his natural drug of choice. This trick barely works for him now, but it’s often all he can get.

The Metaverse brought his addiction to a new level. Hiding behind corners, sneaking just past shadows’ blind spots, sliding down railings and scampering up the sides of buildings – all of it gave him the adrenaline he so badly craved. It was only with the sharp pursuit of death on his heels that Ren could feel alive.

Ren has a hunch that it started for Makoto in a similar way. Like all things in here life, though, Makoto kept her adrenaline junkie tendencies in check. Her life had no intentional procrastination: only the forced cram sessions brought on by too many other things to manage. Instead of extravagant performances, she stuck tight to her thrillers and horror movies, of driving a little too fast down empty roads on her motorcycle.

But when Ren sees the ad on the board, he knows she’ll join him. Nobody else experiences the high as much as they do.

Except Akechi.

Makoto pulls in front of Ren’s apartment building on her motorcycle, striking and dark in the streets of Kyoto. She tosses him a helmet as soon as he steps out the door and smiles.

Ren’s wearing long sleeves despite the heat, but she doesn’t comment on it as she climbs on behind her and wraps his arms around her waist. The metal frame of the motorcycle digs into his leg, right over a bruise from his last thrill-seeking attempt. He’s still got red under the nail on his left ring finger – red from the paint. He had trimmed all his fingernails in an attempt to remove it all, but for whatever reason it just got so embedded underneath that no amount of filing or scrubbing short of what would make him really bleed could get the paint out.

Makoto stays stable as ever, even as she loses herself in the rush of speeding down the streets. They break out of city limits and she guns it, wind whipping Ren in the face. Her laugh is sharp and full as always, and Ren loves her as much as he ever has.

But she’s too good, and she’s found her way with Haru. Ren had his chance, clearly had his opportunity to ask for something more.

He let it go in pursuit of Akechi.

She’s his best friend, warm in his arms as the careen around a corner, his legs squeezing tight against the bike in a frail attempt to keep his body on the vehicle. She cuts to the right, flinging their bodies off in the other direction, feeling the wind with their freedom and glee.

It’s an exhilarating ride to a humble building in the middle of an empty field, a helicopter parked on a pad a few dozen meters away. _“Kyoto Skydiving”_ is displayed in bold red letters on the front.

Ren’s already bought the tickets and they slide them flight suits and goggles.

In the Metaverse, they never had to worry about getting dressed.

But Ren tolerates it the same way he tolerates everything, and he and Makoto exchange grins as they climb aboard the helicopter. Their instructor barks instructions as they soar high into he sky, and Ren feels the best kind of hazy as the world shrinks underneath him.

“Pull the cord when I say,” the instructor says. “Ready?”

Ren jumps.

He can’t breathe with the air filling his lungs, with the wind pushing hard against his body. His face stings as he flies, the ground not feeling so distant as the wind feels near, and his mind is blissfully empty save for the overwhelming sensation of existing in this impossible space.

Everything screams in his body, thrashing out in helplessness, as he ragdolls through sky. It takes every ounce of concentration to see the fields that await underneath, but he didn’t come here to think. Ren lets go of his focus and just lets himself fall.

He feels so free.

He wants to feel like this forever.

He pulls the parachute cord as the instructor’s voice crackles through the radio, a staticky shout amongst the howling whir of falling. Suddenly, his body is yanked from supine to upright, from sprawled to dangling, and the shock of it smacks him right upside the head. He’s dazed, hazy, sharp, clear – everything at once.

Makoto’s a little ways away, a gust of wind carelessly throwing them off course, and Ren feels the lack of control deep within and he lets out a wordless scream of release.

The high remains as his body hits the ground, and he yanks the equipment off himself with ease as he sprints over to Makoto, picking her up and twirling, both caught between laughing and crying. It’s a moment he doesn’t want to let go of, a moment he wishes he could have shared with Akechi, a moment that-

He grips Makoto tightly, not even processing her warm arms around his back.

“I needed this,” she says after a beat.

“I did too.”

But reality has to crash at some point, and the adrenaline drops as Makoto’s feet touch the ground once more.

He’s empty again. Empty of feeling and reason. His mind starts to reach, desperately, for the list of tasks he needs to complete, for the motions he has to go through at the last possible second. There has to be more. He can’t just…

“Let’s grab dinner on the way back,” Makoto offers as they gather their parachutes. “It’s been a while since we’ve been able to spend some time together.”

Ren looks at his parachute. It’s red. Life-saving, thrill-seeking red. It’s crumpled now, sprawled out on the ground, and Ren feels something like dry desperation in his hollow heart. He wants it back again immediately. To choke on air, to plummet as adrenaline skyrockets, yanked up to completeness by red, red, red.

“Sounds good,” Ren hears himself say, and they carry their things up to the business’s Jeep that had pulled up – the whole company had a distinctly American style, disconnected from his reality – and lets his eyes drift closed as they rumble back to the building.

It takes them both a while before they feel grounded enough to board the motorcycle again and make their way to a little diner in the middle of nowhere. Makoto’s driving lacks the sharp edge it had before, exhaustion overtaking the ability for the sharp stress to build again. Instead Ren can only find the aching dread of living through the rest of the day to face more responsibilities tomorrow.

Ren wonders if he’ll ever stop feeling this way.

Ren wonders if he’ll ever start feeling anything that isn’t red.

They pull up to a diner with too-greasy food, and Makoto’s voice is the only thing he can bring himself to concentrate on amidst the clamoring of cooking and chatter.

“How’ve you been holding up?” she asks. “it seems like you’re the most pressed out of all of us, sometimes.”

“That’s just due to bad time management,” Ren says, picking at a plate of fries. When did food become so unbearable?

“Ever the procrastinator,” Makoto sighs. “I don’t understand how you managed it all, that year. You had so much going on, but you still somehow had time for everyone and passed all your exams. Did you ever just want to… take a break?”

“I could say the same to you,” Ren says. “I took a break. _We_ took breaks. Hawaii, the beach… We just came out of summer break from school.”

“I suppose,” Makoto says, “but it just seems that nothing’s really slowed down for you. You pushed yourself hard to get into Kyoto. And I’m so grateful to go to university with you, but I suppose I still don’t see why. I know it’s a bit late to be having this conversation, but you never seemed to care about academics too much, even if you were good at them. Why fight so hard to get into a top school?”

Ren thinks about this for a while, forcing himself to take another bite of his burger. He used to be able to complete the entire Big Bang Burger challenge in record times, but now…

“I wanted more challenge,” he says. “Didn’t know how else to get it. Just kinda had to pick a direction and go.”

Makoto nods. “Something new and different for you, I suppose.”

But new and different isn’t what he wanted. He already got the new and different of a lifetime, and he didn’t want to give it up still. He would give anything to get it back. One more trip into Mementos, one more fight with a Shadow. One more chance to rip his soul from his body and make the world his stage.

It took a while to come down from that high, and when he finally did, it left him desperate.

“Doesn’t quite live up to what we had before,” Ren mutters.

“Yes,” Makoto says, “but this is a little more sustainable, don’t you think?”

Sustainable.

Ren likes to think he could’ve lived as Joker forever, could’ve explored the new reality of existing for an eternity.

He reaches for the bottle of ketchup, desperate to add some kind of flavor to his food, but it’s empty. Makoto seems to be enjoying her plate just fine, so the problem’s probably still just Ren and not the chef’s cooking. He sips the coffee. Caffeine helps, sometimes.

“I’m really grateful it happened,” Makoto says after a while. “The Metaverse. The rush was really something else, wasn’t it? The cause-and-effect of our actions was so clear, too. Nothing like now.”

Ren hums in agreement. Now, the only benefit to school work was good grades, and good grades meant good job, and good job meant good money, which meant… living. Living another day. Empty, maybe.

“But I think that’s some of the beauty of the real world, right? Learning to define a new meaning and discover what you really find fulfilling. It’s not spoon-fed to you anymore. You have to really understand yourself to make yourself the person you want to be, here. It’s not just what you feel.”

Haru was really rubbing off on her.

“Yeah,” Ren says lamely. He wishes, again, for Akechi. Akechi, whose emotions were even more wacked out than Ren’s, who turned from logic to release the second his Detective Prince mask shattered.

Maybe Ren should want to be more like Makoto, so reasonable and determined to be happy in this new life. Accept the future and embrace it, rather than simply float through it. But Ren didn’t want to let go. He just wanted adrenaline.

Makoto somehow managed to have both, though. Could Ren? Would sky-diving mean anything if it didn’t carry those memories with it?

Makoto sighs. “Ren, do you like what you’re studying?”

He probably would, if he could like _anything_ that wasn’t an experience, so he says yes. They sit in silence for a moment.

“I know that you’ve been struggling more than the rest of us, still. Obviously, we all went through some sort of a, I don’t know, withdrawal after everything. I still miss it too, sometimes. And I know I can’t completely understand but if things like… like skydiving, or cliff diving, or downhill mountain biking or shark cages or whatever else may be out there _help_ , then just say the word and I’ll be there with you,” Makoto says.

Ren can feel her quiet resolve shine in her red eyes, and maybe a chain should be breaking, leaving Ren a little more free.

Maybe.

But there’s a bottle of empty ketchup on the table and red paint still stuck under the nail on Ren’s ring finger, and maybe he’s not ready yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just think post-canon ren would be good friends with spike spiegel, is all  
> anyways i'm trying to convince myself it's okay to write something with short chapters but kinda stressed tbh


	3. Chapter 3

Some nights, Ren feels a dampness on his face. He lays in bed, flat on his back with Morgana curled on his stomach and the curtains open enough to let in a thin stripe of light from the streets. The mattress is just as cheap as the one in LeBlanc and his pillows are too soft to give any support, prolonging his descent into sleep just enough to give his mind to catch on everything he thought he missed.

Tonight, Ren raises his hand to his face and feels the tears streaming down it.

Dark red eyes and honey brown hair haunt his thoughts. Ren aches for the echoes of quiet lies rooted in truth, of simple companionship over warm mugs of coffee.

Ren often tears himself between working so hard he can’t remember Akechi and scrolling through photos so he can’t forget. He feels it’s too early to move on but moving on would be a crime.

Ren is normally okay with his emotions. He’s good at unpacking and sorting them enough that he doesn’t need to make them anyone else’s problem. Most are fairly straightforward: getting expelled and exiled to Tokyo for a crime he didn’t commit made him frustrated. Looking at Kamoshida’s cognition of Ann and Kaneshiro’s plans of exploiting Makoto made him disgusted. Watching Yusuke lose the image of the father he so dearly loved made him sad. And so on.

Nothing to discuss, because it was so clear and obvious how he should feel, and he felt those ways.

This?

Mourning the loss of your only equal, a boy with a gun and a smile, a literal murderer and child?

Ren likes to lie to himself, sometimes. That Akechi didn’t actually shoot him. He had no way of knowing; he wasn’t in that world, after all. Maybe Akechi had other plans.

Ren knows it’s a lie, but there’s nobody to tell him the truth anymore.

Ren likes to dream, too. Of a world with Akechi now.

He wonders if Akechi would still want him now that the Metaverse was gone. Ren was boring now, empty and numb. Ren studies and sleeps, going through the steps of living the life that the world never wanted him to have.

Ren dreams that Akechi’s alive, that he comes back with another Palace to search, that they duel every day and awaken to greater and greater power. Ren dreams of seeing Akechi in action as the Black Mask, of sprinting side-by-side through the halls of Mementos.

Ren dreams that they spend the weekdays working and studying, and that every night he comes home and they talk about the bullshit of mundane living. That he cooks them both curry – Ren never finds a reason to cook it just for himself – and brews mugs of coffee and they sit on the couch together and turn on a fighting game. That they go to bed together and wake up on the weekends, raring for another run through the Metaverse.

Ren dreams his friends are there, too, but even in his most indulgent dreams he cannot devise a way for his friends to accept Akechi. He wants them to, so badly, wants it all back to the way he pretended it was in early November that year, but it’s not meant to be and it was _never_ meant to be and –

\- and he just likes to dream if he and Akechi ran away from it all, if they moved somewhere private and far away, if they went abroad and escaped the mess of corruption in Japan and learned of the distorted desires elsewhere, somewhere more distant from Akechi’s difficult past, and maybe they’d be the duo Ren always knew they could be. Maybe their rivalry would evolved into the love it always held, maybe he would finally get to -

Ren chokes, his face chilling as the air cools the damp tear tracks over his cheeks.

Morgana stirs at the shift, causing his tail to tickle the side of Ren’s neck. He turns to face him, blue eyes glowing in the night.

“Ren?” he asks. “Are you okay?”

Ren doesn’t know what he’s feeling. Ren just _wants_. But he’s not allowed to want, and Morgana can’t know how much he does. He’s allowed to feel what he often does – he’s allowed to miss the Metaverse, and with some people, even miss Akechi. But this isn’t allowed. This doesn’t even make _sense._ It’s so phenomenally _stupid_ and it’s been _three years_ and Ren needs to _stop._

“Did you have a nightmare?”

If he had a nightmare, he would’ve managed to fall asleep.

Ren searches for some semblance of control, but it feels like he’s spiraling down, down, down-

“Ren, breathe with me.” Morgana lays and presses their chests together. Morgana inhales slowly, making Ren feel it, before gently exhaling. Ren forces himself to match.

In, two, three. Out, two, three.

A massage would help right now. The thought’s a distant one, and the only one that he thinks he might be allowed to have, so he holds onto it and brings it to the foreground.

A massage would be really nice. Kawakami was so good at those, and so kind for tolerating so much bullshit from a student.

He wonders, a little desperately, what massaging Akechi would feel like. But his body’s already winding down again, the flood of emotions eroding away and eroding into the ever-present void of exhaustion.

His eyes are closed, his mind almost in dreamless sleep, when Morgana speaks again.

“If you ever want to talk about this, please. Ren, I’m worried about you.”

Ren doesn’t respond.

He’ll wake up in the morning anyways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i, like, started oversharing in the end notes and then i realized that it's 1am and i need to go to bed to take a quiz this morning that i haven't studied for. i love college.


End file.
